Monday, November 29, 2010

Because of Martha (BOM): Cupcake Challenge 2/175

For any unfamiliar readers, I am a fan of Martha Stewart. She (and her genius employees, of course) is very talented at coming up with excellent recipes and crafts. I happened upon her Cupcakes cookbook and BOOM!—lightbulb. I decided since there are 175 cupcakes total, I'd do the crazy thing and make each one. This is not a Julie & Julia thing, but it is proving to be delicious. I have no set deadline or time to make cupcakes, but there are moments when you need a cupcake. In the future, I hope that this will aid me in becoming a better baker with more ideas and several tricks up my sleeve.

This installment features Pumpkin-Brown Butter Cupcakes. They seemed like a perfect Thanksgiving cupcake. They take all that is wonderful about pumpkin bread (or cookies) in cupcake form.

Like everything else, this began with gathering my ingredients. Most of these are commonly used for pumpkin, so you'll notice the nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon and light brown sugar as quite traditional. There were great deals on the price since it's baking season.

This is my hopeful outcome, but let's get started.

The recipe called for the sage to be chiffonade. I had to do a bit of research and watch a video, but I think the sage added some good flavor to the mix.

After browning my butter, I measured and combined all of my ingredients. A Kitchen-Aid mixer will save your life, trust me.

Once my dough was the proper consistency, I spooned the dough into buttered-and-floured muffin cups. No liners for this one. Talk about messy.

About 22 minutes later, these warm cupcakes were ready to come out of the oven. They smelled divine. I wish I could attach the smell of fresh pumpkin-brown butter cupcakes to this post!

Once they were completely cooled, I dipped them in brown-butter icing. Maybe they don't look exactly like the ones above, but they are kind of close and very good. I loved these! They are not ultra-sweet so the glaze gives just the right touch. Talk about a well-balanced recipe.